Write the Docs — Channel Summaries
AI-powered summaries of 45 videos about Write the Docs.
45 summaries
Document What Matters: Lean Best Practice for Process Documentation - Gillian von Runte
Lean best practice for process documentation starts with a blunt premise: document only what creates customer value, and keep it current by making...
Write the Docs Prague 2017: What nobody tells you about documentation by Daniele Procida
Documentation isn’t a single thing—it’s four distinct kinds of material that serve different jobs in a user’s journey. When teams mix those jobs...
Kelly O'Brien - Surprise! You're a designer now.
Content design is a product discipline focused on structuring and presenting information—and its real value shows up when teams involve it early,...
Marcia Riefer Johnston & Dave May - One AWS team’s move to docs as code
AWS’s documentation team moved from Word-and-PDF workflows to “docs as code” in GitHub, cutting publication time and making documentation changes as...
Ryan Paul - Documentation as an application: enabling interactive content tailored to the user
Stripe’s documentation is shifting from static, page-by-page manuals into an application-like experience that adapts to each user—while also fixing...
A brief history of text markup languages - Tony Ibbs
Text markup languages evolved from manual typewriter conventions into systems that separate meaning from appearance, then into formats designed for...
James Scott - How to write the perfect error message
Error messages are small pieces of microcopy with outsized consequences: when they’re unclear, blameful, or dead ends, they can trigger frustration,...
Learning to love release notes - Anne Edwards
Release notes may look like a routine chore, but they’re often where technical teams accidentally hide the most important information: what changed...
Product Documentation Strategy - Kay Miles
Product documentation strategy is the missing layer that turns fragmented, product-by-product documentation into a consistent, intelligent content...
Building Empathy-Driven Developer Documentation - Kat King - Write the Docs Portland 2018
Twilio’s developer education team built “empathy-driven documentation” by treating developer frustration as a measurable, research-backed signal—not...
Don't Say Simply - Jim Fisher
“Don’t say simply” is the core takeaway: the word “simply” often hides the concepts and assumptions that make a task feel straightforward to...
Daniele Procida - Always complete, never finished
Documentation work often gets trapped in long, detailed planning cycles that delay publishing and amplify anxiety—leaving teams with “work in...
Write the Docs Portland 2017: Treating Documentation like Code: a Practical Account by Jodie Putrino
Treating documentation like code matters because it keeps release-critical instructions synchronized with product development—so teams don’t scramble...
[Lightning Talk] Emily Axel - Process Recordings: Documenting Social Work Conversations
Process recordings—verbatim documentation of what’s said in a client session, paired with the worker’s internal reactions and supervisory...
How to edit other people's content without pissing them off - Ingrid Towey
Editing other people’s documentation without triggering defensiveness comes down to one practical shift: treat edits as customer-focused improvements...
Swapnil Ogale - Putting the “tech” in technical writer
Technical writers don’t need to become full-time developers to bring “tech” into their work—enough command of the tools, workflows, and text formats...
Alex Garnett - Docs AI Tooling is Better (and Better for Us) than You Think
Docs teams don’t need to choose between “AI everywhere” and “AI is poison.” Alex Garnett argues that the most practical, high-value use of AI in...
Jen Lambourne - The UK government meets docs as code
The UK government’s Government Digital Service (GDS) turned technical documentation into “docs as code,” but the real breakthrough wasn’t the...
Write the Docs Portland 2017: Error Messages: Being Humble, Human, and Helpful... by Kate Voss
Error messages are often treated as an afterthought, but they’re actually a high-stakes moment to rebuild user trust when software fails. When...
Lessons Learned in a Year of Docs-Driven Development - Jessica Parsons
Docs-driven development—writing documentation first, then building to match it—has become a practical operating system for teams trying to move...
Margaret Eker, Jennifer Rondeau - Docs as Code: The Missing Manual
Docs as code is less about changing what documentation is written in and more about making documentation delivery behave like software delivery:...
Abigail Sutherland - Organizing a Confluence hoard, or, does this page spark joy?
A sprawling Confluence setup—33 spaces and more than 20,000 pages—was turning into a daily irritant because people couldn’t find what they needed and...
Dennis Dawson - Graphic Relief: Beyond Flowcharts and Screenshots
Documentation fails most often when it’s written for the author’s convenience, not the reader’s job. Dennis Dawson’s core finding is that technical...
Write the Docs Portland 2017: Building navigation for your doc site: 5 best practices by Tom Johnson
Finding the right help page is often the real bottleneck in documentation—not writing clarity. Usability testing in a controlled lab setting showed...
Matthew Baldwin - Read the Rules: What technical writers can learn from board game design
Board game rules are a high-stakes form of technical writing because they’re effectively “unpatchable” once printed: if a rule is unclear or missing,...
Michelle Irvine - Quantifying the Impact of Documentation: Findings from DORA Research
Documentation quality is measurable—and it shows up in business and engineering outcomes across software organizations. Based on DORA research...
Janine Chan - Seven habits of increasingly technical technical writers
Technical writers (and anyone moving from “good” to “great”) become more capable not by collecting a pile of courses or waiting for a confidence...
Ryan Paul - Two years of Markdoc: what we’ve learned about balancing developer and author experience
Markdoc is Stripe’s solution to a scaling problem in documentation: when engineers can freely embed code inside content, documentation becomes harder...
Michael Meng - API documentation: Exploring the information needs of software developers
API documentation succeeds or fails less on how much information it contains and more on whether developers can quickly find solutions in the order...
Kayla Lee - The Super Effective Writing Process of Grammy-winning Artists
Grammy-winning artists succeed not by chasing productivity hacks, but by building creativity through deliberate “rituals” and a tightly managed,...
Rachel Rigdon - Quest for the Holy Grail: Turning User Feedback into Meaningful Change
User feedback becomes genuinely valuable only when it’s tied to a system for evaluation, ownership, and follow-through—Sailpoint’s documentation team...
Ryan Young - Is it (layer) cake: Thinking in content levels
Stripe’s documentation frustration isn’t coming from a lack of information—it’s coming from mismatched “content levels” that force users to make the...
The art and practice of documentation triage - Neal Kaplan - Write the Docs Portland 2018
Documentation triage is the discipline of deciding—fast, ruthlessly, and with evidence—what documentation is truly critical right now, then shipping...
Jessica Garson - Writing a perfect technical tutorial
A strong technical tutorial isn’t measured by clicks alone—it’s built to get a specific reader to complete a specific action, and then it’s...
Avi Flax - Set your data free with model-based architecture diagramming
Software architecture diagrams work best when the underlying architecture is treated as a model—separate from the visuals—so teams can collaborate on...
Lana Brindley - More than words: Reviewing and updating your information architecture
Apartment marketing language may sound “architecturally designed,” but the real lesson is about documentation: words and structure matter only if...
Write the Docs Portland 2017: Even Naming This Talk Is Hard by Ruthie BenDor
Naming in software is hard because names are guesswork that must fit human mental models—and when they miss, the damage shows up as confusion,...
Swizec Teller - What I learned writing a lousy tech book
A tech author’s path from blog post to published book turned into a lesson in how nonfiction quality gets shaped—often painfully—by contracts,...
Draw the Docs - Alicja Raszkowska
A non-technical-writer engineer built a practical, repeatable way to use drawings in day-to-day work—then turned that into a documentation-friendly...
Alexandra White - Moving beyond empathy: a11y in documentation
Accessibility in documentation isn’t a feel-good add-on—it’s a practical, anti-racist responsibility that technical writers can act on through...
Making Your Code Examples Shine - Larry Ullman - Write the Docs Portland 2018
Code examples become genuinely useful—and easier to trust—when they’re built around user needs, enforced through consistent style, and maintained...
[Lightning Talk] Julia Evans - Can we (sometimes) go back to print documentation?
Print documentation can still be a smart choice when the subject matter is stable—especially for foundational concepts that won’t churn as fast as...
How to tear down existing documentation and rewrite docs that actually work - Alexandra White
Documentation quality often collapses under fragmentation—multiple sites, hidden or outdated content, inconsistent voices, and no lifecycle...
Karissa Van Baulen - The Importance of Using Analytics and Feedback for your Documentation
Documentation and knowledge bases improve fastest when teams treat user analytics and in-page feedback as a single system—using numbers to find where...
Controlled Vocabulary - Kristin McKee - Write the Docs Portland 2018 Lightning Talk
A controlled vocabulary is a living, organized list of terms, phrases, and concepts designed to help people navigate a specific context—and the...